


five times lucifer attempts to reconcile with his son (and the one time it isn't terrible)

by TrekFaerie



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: 5+1 Things, Absent Parents, Bad Matchmaking, Demons, Families of Choice, Father-Son Relationship, Friendship, Future Fic, Gen, Good Intentions, Growing Up, Reconciliation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-22
Updated: 2019-07-25
Packaged: 2020-07-10 17:16:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 4,950
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19909354
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TrekFaerie/pseuds/TrekFaerie
Summary: [1] Final Count: Two windows broken, one car door dinged, and one minor concussion for R.P. Tyler, who had been walking by.





	1. Chapter 1

It started with a girl.

Her name, she said, was Lili. She was, she said, their age, which she seemed to need to have confirmed before she would commit to 16. Her hair was long and wild, reaching down to her hips, and her eyes were yellow. Ten minutes after she met the Them on the bus coming back from London, she had already separated Adam from the group and was sitting at the front with him. It certainly appeared that she was holding his hand.

“She’s a demon,” Pepper said.

Brian gave her a doubtful look. “Are you saying that because you really do think she’s a demon,” he asked, “or because you get mad every time Adam spends time with people that aren’t us?”

“How dare you even ask me that!”

“You spent three weeks trying to convince everyone that Warlock was a Mossad agent here to kill Adam ‘cause you wouldn’t believe they were brothers.”

“Yes, well.” She paused her glaring at Lili to give Brian a good glaring. “That’s different.”

“It’s really not.”

“It really is! I’d never use this term lightly, after everything that’s happened… She’s an actual demon. That girl _reeks_ of sulfur.”

“I think that’s just her perfume. It’s kinda nice.”

“Our best friend is being… _assaulted_ by some sort of… demonic succubus, and you won’t even have the decency to believe me!”

“I think they’re just kissing a bit?”

She banged her head against the seat in front of her. “Wensley! Help me!”

“I _am_.” He glanced up from his phone, which he had been furiously typing on for the entirety of their conversation. “It says here that different herbs can be used to help banish demons. If we can use them on her, maybe Adam will be freed from her influence.”

“I’ve got a bit of focaccia left in my bag from lunch,” Brian said.

“Oh, so _now_ you’re going to help us free our friend from a demon.”

“I mean, I’m not giving up the opportunity to throw some bread at someone, demon or no demon.”

They had ended up dividing the focaccia between them and storming the front of the bus as it stopped at the Tadfield stop, pelting Lili with bread and shouting random Biblical-sounding things at her, dragging Adam away by his shirt collar in the confusion. At the very least, she didn’t follow them, and though Adam was incredibly confused _and_ mad that they didn’t save any focaccia to eat after, they considered it a job very well done.

-

Back on the bus, Lilith quietly murdered the bus driver, taking his place as she shoved his corpse under a nearby seat and started the bus back to London. She fiddled with the radio until it landed on a station that filled the empty bus with the sound of billions of lost souls screaming in agony.

“Your son did not accept me, My Lord,” she said. She could feel her form slowly return to something much more comfortable; she hadn’t been looking forward to spending any amount of time as a stupid teenager again, even as a favor to her dark master and his ungrateful brat of a son. She wouldn’t tell him that, of course. “Forgive me for my failure.”

The only response was an increase in the screaming. Well. Better them than her, she always said.

When the bus pulled back into the station in London, everyone was so caught up in the horror of finding old Robert dead that nobody noticed the elderly woman slowly parting her way through the distraught crowd.


	2. Chapter 2

The next time, it was a boy.

“Whatever their other faults,” Pepper said, “and whatever nefarious plans they’re attempting to use Adam in, Hell is clearly very progressive-minded, and for that, we have to give them credit.”

It was an under-18 night at a club in Swindon, the sort of place all the kids in Tadfield liked to head over to after class let out on Fridays. Usually, the Them were huddled together on the dance floor, thrashing around in the sort of odd, jumpy dances teenagers liked to do with their friends. That night, however, three of Them were huddled instead around a booth off the floor, nursing flat colas and glaring at the guy spinning Adam around.

He had introduced himself as Paimon, which was definitely a demon-sounding name, which meant he hadn’t even considered them important enough to lie to – enough to anger all three of them equally, instead of Pepper being forced to drag the others into her own righteous fury. He had a pretty face, and flashy clothes, and he put his hand at the small of Adam’s back as they danced.

“Do you think they do it with spells?” Brian asked. “Like brainwashing, or mind control?”

Pepper gave him a Look. “Why is that more believable to you than Adam just getting stupid every time someone with a pretty face is brave enough to give him even the slightest bit of attention?”

“That might explain it better,” Wensleydale said. “Obviously demons aren’t intimidated by him.”

“I don’t see why anyone is intimidated by him,” Brian said. “He’s just Adam. It’s not like he’s used his fell powers to intimidate humans into doing his bidding _lately_.”

“He’s just got a sense of something greater about him, really.” She shrugged. “And he’s too fit. That’s what all the girls at school say. They think he’s got a model girlfriend in the city already or something.”

“… Do you think this is… Do you think his Other Dad is behind this?”

Brian and Pepper stared at Wensleydale, and then at each other. They… didn’t like to talk about Adam’s “Other Dad” too much. Sure, it was fine to make light of how their friend had a material connection to forces far outside their ken, how he lived in the realm of angels and demons and witches and warlocks as easily as he lived among them, but… thinking about _why_ that was? That was a bit different. Adam himself hadn’t spoken about it since the day at the airbase, when he’d decided that Mr. Young was all the dad he needed. It mostly seemed like he was content to pretend that had never even been a thing.

But, if Satan was sending demons after Adam, for whatever strange purpose… Well. Clearly pretending was no longer on the table, and measures needed to be taken.

Brian spilled his soda all over the demon’s fancy clothes, and while he loudly made apologies and somehow managed to make the stain even worse, Pepper managed to smuggle Adam into the girls’ toilets, where they climbed out a very small window and joined up with the others outside the club. Adam seemed a bit out of sorts for a bit – but, then he shook his head, smiled, and suggested getting some milkshakes before they took the last bus home.

-

Beelzebub groaned as Paimon shuffled back through the office, looking utterly defeated. “Well, I’m officially out of ideas,” she said. Ligur pinched the bridge of his nose. Dagon put her head on her desk.

Hastur glanced nervously down the hall. “Someone’s going to have to tell him,” he said.

“We have been in the business of tempting humans for thousands of years,” Beelzebub said, mainly to the ceiling, “and yet, we are confounded. By our own master’s son. Who ought to be the _easiest_!”

“He threw Lilith into magma when she got back last time,” he said. “She hasn’t grown her arms back yet.”

“To be fair,” Dagon said, “we have only really tried _two_ things. They might be the most obvious, but… Surely teenage humans like other things.”

“I haven’t even been to Earth since the Black Death!" She sighed. "Do they still like… Sticks that look like horses? Hand puppets? Cholera?”

“There is _someone_ we know,” Ligur said, slowly and carefully, “that knows an awful lot about humans. And what they like.”

Silence fell over them.

“… Dagon. Find our master’s son a stick-horse. I’m sure we can manage—“


	3. Chapter 3

Adam started finding baseballs in his house.

The first few times, it was just a strange occurrence. He didn’t even really like baseball, and neither did anyone else he knew; it wasn’t exactly the sort of ball you’d throw to Dog, either, so he couldn’t imagine why anyone in his family would have purchased even one ball, let alone three or four.

After the fifth, however, they started to change. They were brand-new balls, with fresh signatures. When he searched the names online, they were all of baseball players, and all long dead. There were mitts, soon, and bats. They started to pile up under his bed, where he’d been shoving them. When he got annoyed and started throwing them in the garbage bin, it seemed to stop.

For a time. Then, it changed again.

There were toys: old ones, to start, impossibly old but somehow new as the day they were made. Then, newer ones: flashy mechanical robots and expensive Lego sets, and a shiny bicycle with red and black ribbons. He parceled them all up and donated them; sent boxes of toys to worthy children’s charities all over the country, and his mother pinned the effusive thank-you letters and photos of children enjoying the toys to the front of the fridge.

There were bags of candies, lemon drops and sour gummies and cinnamon hard candies. A truck from the actual company, driven by some very nervous-looking men in strange suits, pulled up next to him as he rode his bike home from school and dropped an entire pallet of Mars bars in front of his house. All the other sweets, he’d pushed onto his friends, or given away at school, where he became even more immensely popular than normal, but the Mars bars… Those, he burned. He took a match from his father’s matchbox and burned them in the street.

He sat on the stone of the fence and watched the flames, fiddling with the baseball in his hands. He’d kept one, from the deluge; it had been signed by Babe Ruth, and even he knew that was an important name, even if he mainly knew it because of another chocolate bar.

He felt someone sit next to him, and he was smiling even before he turned his head. “Hi, Dad,” he said. He pushed the ball into his lap. “I saved that one for you. It’s from Babe Ruth. He’s dead, so it ought to be pretty valuable.”

In the five years since the Apocalypse had not actually happened, Adam had explained very, very little to his parents – mainly, because they were so very, very normal that he was worried exposure to the weird world he’d been born into would break them, like people in those weird books about fish demons and racism. The combined effort of a witch, an angel, and a demon, along with copious amounts of tea and one faint (from his father) had managed to get them onto, if not the same page as everyone else, then at least the same chapter. They knew, at the very least, that demonic forces had been behind the conception of their Adam, who was very, very much theirs; they just didn’t know that the demonic force was _the_ demonic force.

“It’s been a bit of a trial this week, hasn’t it?” Something about the ball didn’t sit right in Mr. Young’s hands; he ended up placing it beside him, where it sat with what he felt was a quiet menace. “I’d come out to be cross over the fire, but… It’s probably for the best. And if being in the Scouts didn’t teach you enough to safely burn a crate of chocolate bars by yourself, then what use was it?”

“I don’t know what’s going on,” Adam said, putting his face in his hands. “I just want everything to go back to normal already.”

“Someone is clearly trying to send a message to you. It doesn’t _seem_ like it’s a bad one, for once…” He tried to touch the ball again, but it just… Didn’t feel like it would accept him, specifically. He didn't want to understand it, so he didn't. “Toys, sweets… The baseball, especially. It’s all rather… paternal, isn’t it?”

Adam frowned. “’Paternal?’”

“You know, fatherly. It’s more of an American sort of way, but… Have you ever listened to Harry Chapin before?” He shook his head. “An American singer – your mum fancied him a bit, when we were teenagers. She’s probably still got the record, in storage… I’ll try to find it for you.”

The record played as Adam sprawled out on the couch in the living room, waiting for his parents to finish making dinner. It was an odd sort of song, about cats and cradles and silver spoons, and it was sad, in the way a lot of songs his mum liked were sad. He wasn’t sure he liked it, and he wasn’t sure it made the baseballs make any more sense, but it did…

“Dad,” he said, as he sat down to dinner, “after school tomorrow, do you think… we could throw the ball around a bit? Like in the song?”

He didn’t understand why his mother had to suddenly leave the room, dabbing at her eyes with a napkin, but his dad smiled at him, and agreed to try it. [1]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [1] Final Count: Two windows broken, one car door dinged, and one minor concussion for R.P. Tyler, who had been walking by.


	4. Chapter 4

If there was one thing Adam had always had a particular focus on, even before he knew he had powers that could greatly affect it, it was weather. He liked weather, a lot. He liked things to be the way they were in books, the perfect weather for whatever the day had in store, the perfect climate for the time and the place. Perfect weather was the necessary strong foundation for perfect days.

He’d never been particularly fond of rainbows. They were nice enough, he supposed; they made it seem like the sky was trying to make a good first impression after a rainstorm. But that was exactly that: they happened after rainstorms. It hadn’t rained at all that day. Rainbows also had a very set order in their colors; this one looked like the person who had made it hadn’t actually ever seen a rainbow before, but knew the general shape and almost all the colors that were in it. Also, it was inside his house, which wasn’t where rainbows generally happened.

Pepper had been staring at it with a flat expression for a full fifteen minutes, as a rainbow being localized entirely in the corner of a living room was much more interesting than watching Adam and Brian be terrible at whatever PS5 game they were playing.

“And it’s just been… following you around?” she asked. Adam nodded. “That’s stupid. Rainbows aren’t supposed to follow you. If they did, it would be too easy to catch leprechauns.”

Wensleydale, who also had been focused on finding something much more interesting, brightened. “ _Have_ you looked for a leprechaun?” he asked. Adam shook his head. “I think you ought to. If a rainbow is following you around, it’s probably because a leprechaun wants to give you something.”

“Leprechauns don’t give things! That defeats their whole purpose, if they just give away their pots of gold to anybody.”

“Perhaps it’s not gold. It could also be that cereal. My parents don’t buy that particular cereal; they say it has no nutritional content.”

“My mum says they put bug poison in the red balloons to give us all cancer.”

“They’ve got a point, you know,” Brian said, furiously tapping buttons.

“About what?” Adam asked, fiddling the joysticks as if his life depended on it.

“About the leprechaun. Might as well give it a try,” he said. 

“And the cereal?”

“They’re not right about the cereal, obviously. If any of the marshmallows were gonna give us cancer, it’d be the little stars.”

The end of a rainbow only comes into existence when people search for it, so it didn’t take them very long to find it after they had declared their intentions. There was, however, no leprechaun where it ended on the coffee table. There also wasn’t any gold, in pots or otherwise, and there were certainly no marshmallows. There was, however, a small stack of paper slips that were immediately recognizable to them as concert tickets. Adam picked the top one up and held it up to the light, as the others read over his shoulders:

**SSS ENTERTAINMENT PRESENTS**

**THE RECONCILIATION TOUR**

**8PM. LOWER TADFIELD.  
ONE NIGHT ONLY**

Pepper frowned. “Why would you name a company,” she made a hissing noise with her teeth.

“It probably stands for something,” Brian said. “An aberration.”

“An abbreviation,” Wensleydale said. “Or an acronym.”

“’Sescenti Sexaginta Sex,’” Adam said, and it was only exhaustion that stopped them all from collapsing into fits of the giggles. “It’s him. Again.”

“It could be a trap,” Brian said.

“It’s definitely a trap,” Pepper said.

“It is actually, most likely, a trap,” Wensleydale said.

Adam scooped up the other tickets, distributing them to each. “Well,” he said, “let’s get a wiggle on, then.”

And They, of course, followed.


	5. Chapter 5

If Adam, or anyone else in the Young family, had been paying even the slightest bit of attention, they would have noticed something very peculiar about the box of old records Mrs. Young had pulled out of storage the other week – namely, that it was entirely gone. It had been quietly magicked away in the dead of night, and the results of it were currently setting up in the village green.

Two things were immediately obvious: some sort of demonic intervention had taken place to keep the residents of Tadfield inside their homes for the duration of the whole mess; and while half the people running about, with cables and generators and the other detritus of music festivals, were very clearly demons, quite a few of them were just dead people.

Adam had never met a dead person before. He had met people who couldn’t die, and he had met Death itself, but those were both very different from actual dead people. They looked a little bit like zombies from Hollywood films, with pale or greenish tints to their skins, and very obvious signs of the ways they had died. A roadie with a bullet wound in his temple walked by them, carrying a speaker. A demon with a face like a deep-sea fish served them free churros. They were the only living humans around.

There was already a band playing its set as they wandered up to the main stage, gnawing on their churros. A sickly man with an afro played guitar while an equally sickly lady with long hair and round glasses crooned into a nearby microphone. Three clean-cut young men who looked like they had been hastily slapped back together strummed acoustic guitars. There was a heavy-set older man in a tuxedo that did not seem to be singing anything even remotely close in style to any of the others.

Adam glanced at his friends. “Do you guys… recognize literally a single person on this stage?” he asked.

Brian frowned, scanning the group. “Not really,” he said. “They all seem a bit… Oh! There’s Tupac, at the end. That’s about it.”

“They’re all dead,” Pepper said. Her tone was inscrutable, a mix of shock, horror, and an incredible amount of amusement. “He… He’s gone and forced a bunch of dead musicians to play for you.”

“Why would he do something like that?” Wensleydale asked. His tone was simple, clear horror.

She paused, clearly thinking. “… Have you ever had your parents do something that wasn’t very nice to you,” she said, “and then, they do something nice after, to make up for what they did wrong?”

“Parents admit they’re wrong?” Brian asked.

“There was that time my father didn’t sign a permission slip in time, so I wasn’t able to go on that class trip a few years back,” Wensleydale said. “When we went up to Kielder that summer, Mother said it was his way of saying ‘sorry.’”

“Guys, nobody told me parents were meant to say ‘sorry.’”

“My mum broke a toy of mine doing yoga when I was little,” Pepper said. “She bought me proper ice cream for a whole month – real stuff, no non-dairy milks or anything… Anyway, that’s what I think this stuff has been about. It’s your Other Dad, trying to earn your forgiveness by giving you nice things.”

“He’s not very good at it,” Brian said.

She shrugged. “He’s Satan,” she said. “He’s not meant to be _good_ at anything.”

“He’s going through all this trouble…” Adam began tearing up the little wax paper the churro had been wrapped in, shredding into tiny little pieces that piled at his feet. “He’s going through all this trouble, all this bother, all this _mess_ … And he won’t even just...”

Normally, storming the stage at a music festival will get you, at the very least, kicked off of it, if not out of it entirely, by security. But, when that security knows you’re the boss’ kid, and is also made up of hellish dukes that really just don’t want to be involved in any of this anymore, you can pretty much get away with anything. He swiped a microphone from a dead man in a thin white suit, and looked out over his audience… which was just his friends, and a bunch of demons, and a lot of dead people, all standing in the middle of his town and looking up at him, as if awaiting his orders. He didn’t like it.

“Go back to your master,” he said. “Go back and tell him that I’m sick of all this mucking about. Tell him that if he wants to come and have a proper conversation with me about all this, I’ll be waiting. And if he doesn’t, tell him to leave me alone, leave my friends alone, leave my _family_ alone, and **fuck off**!”

The demons, the dead musicians, even Them – they all found themselves cringing before the Power he put into his words, their legs failing them and sending them to kneel on the ground before him. The Them didn’t move a muscle until Pepper felt his hand on her shoulder, and they looked up into his sad eyes.

“C’mon, guys,” he said. “Let’s go home.”


	6. Chapter 6

There weren’t any apple trees, in Adam’s back garden. There were, however, two cherry trees, which both produced lovely pink blossoms every year, and an abundance of both sweet and sour cherries. Adam liked to sit in the shade between them, nicely convincing cherries from both trees to fall easily into his waiting palms, mercilessly pitting them, and then tossing the stones over the fence as he ate the fruit, making them someone else’s problem.

There was a presence, next to him, sitting under the sour cherry tree. He ignored it. He wasn’t planning on being the first one to speak; if he honestly wanted to even start at trying to make things right, the least he had to do was prove he wasn’t too much of a coward to talk to his damned son.

He did look at him, though, a few times. He looked entirely different than he had at the airbase; the way Anathema had explained it, demons could take on many different forms, from big scary monsters to just normal people. This one was, he supposed, the “just normal people” one: a man, strong of feature, with perhaps the most normal eyes he had ever seen on a demon. His hair was curly and blonde, and properly so; it wasn’t the darker shade of Adam, or the lighter one of Aziraphale, but like burnished threads of gold, like wildflower honey. He was frightfully beautiful, in that looking at him made you wonder what sort of terrible things he had to do to people to make himself look like that, and where his portrait was hidden.

Lucifer stretched out his back; he sat as if being in such a confined space for such a long time was a trial for him. “So. This is your Eden,” he said, gesturing at the world around them. “This is what you cast aside your destiny for.”

“I could have been born anywhere, I think, and still made the same decision. Could’ve ended up in America, or Africa… This whole world’s worth saving; Tadfield’s just the part of it I love best, ‘cause it’s mine.”

Lucifer, Satan, the Devil, Father of Lies, the Great Deceiver, the Enemy of Humanity – did not seem to know what to do with his hands. They clenched uselessly in his lap, and he seemed overly focused on staring at them, instead of anywhere even close to Adam’s direction. “I’ve been doing very little but thinking about what you said to me,” he said, his voice little more than a soft murmur, “these past few years.”

“I meant every word of it. As far as I’m concerned, you aren’t my dad. My dad’s inside, watching telly. You’re just…” He shrugged. “I don’t know what you are. Mum called you my ‘biological dad,’ the one time we talked about it, but you’re not even that, are you? I made it so you weren’t. You made me, but you didn’t.”

“Reality accepts your will over it.” He smiled ruefully. “That, I could never do. Manipulate it, yes, bend and twist it… But, always with force. Never with full cooperation from existence. That… That’s definitely from Your Mother.”

[[1]](https://66.media.tumblr.com/030cb6f28272eb9c250a9fc93f708abb/tumblr_inline_plwdlbCTEG1slof0d_540.jpg) “Why did you wait until now to do this?” he asked. “Why didn’t you just come to me at the start, before you started doing all of this weird stuff?

“I knew you wouldn’t see me.” Adam, who knew he was right, didn’t respond. “I wanted to… ease the way, a little. I wanted to give you gifts, things you would like… But, then I realized that I had no idea what you would like. I don’t know the first thing about you.”

“I don’t like Mars bars, by the way,” he said. “I don’t like most anything with caramel. It gets stuck between my teeth.”

“See! I had no idea.” He laughed humorlessly. “When I helped to create you… It was never with the intention to truly create a person. I never thought of you as a child; you were only a vessel, to be used for a greater purpose.”

“For the Ineffable Plan.” Lucifer nodded, and he frowned. “It’s not a very good plan, is it? If it involves making kids to use as weapons, and not to just let them be kids. You could’ve just spent your time making a really cool gun to kill God with, or something.”

His brows jumped up towards his hairline. “… The ingenuity of humans,” he said, whistling out a breath. “If we could harness that, we could truly make an ultimate weapon.”

“I don’t think you ought to make any sorts of weapons out of people.”

“You’re right, of course.” He smirked. “Humans are too difficult to control. Too many variables.”

“Also, it’s just not really nice to do.”

“There is that. There is always that.”

Adam’s fingers were wine-red from cherry juice. “Well, now you’ve seen me. And been seen. What is it, exactly, that you want?”

“I’m… not really sure. I think I just want...” He paused. “I was never truly your age, in the truest sense of the word; but, there was a time when I was at roughly the same place in my life as you are… I was young, and curious, and willful. I asked questions that no one wanted to answer, and when there were no answers, I asked more questions.”

“And then what happened?” he asked, guilelessly.

… He grinned. “Nothing too terrible,” he said. “What I’m saying is… I want to know you, Adam. Not as the Antichrist, as a tool or a weapon… I want to know you as you are, as the human you are growing up to be. I want to be part of the life I helped create. Because it does seem that, in spite of me, it has turned out to be a glorious one.”

“Hm… I think, that…” He looked over at the sunset, peeking over the hedgerows. Time had been stopped for too long, he thought; he was going to get tired way before bedtime, if he kept it up. “I don’t think I’d mind it, much, if you stopped by every once in a while. Just talk like this for a while. See where that goes.”

Another cherry fell out of the tree and Adam’s hand, but he had not called for it. He glanced up to see Lucifer, holding his hand out to him, palm up, like a supplicant. “Thousands of years ago, everything changed for humanity because a piece of fruit was eaten in a garden,” he said. “Perhaps, with another garden, and another fruit… We could change things once more.”

Adam thought for a moment, and then, wordlessly, handed him the cherry. He popped it into his mouth whole, spitting out the pit. When the stem came out after, it had been tied to look like the outline of a skull. “Oh, that’s wicked!” Adam said, finding himself leaning in to examine it further. “How’d you even learn how to do that?”

“I didn’t learn it at all. It comes naturally to me – to us,” he said, with a grin, “like other curious things.”

Adam twisted a stem between his fingers. Perhaps there were a few things, he privately admitted, that his other father would be worth having around for.


End file.
